Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Your Sexuality Through a Photo - Creates Controversy in the LGBT Community

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A new intelligent algorithm is able to predict very efficiently the sexual orientation of a person through the analysis of a photograph. This new research has led to the rejection of two major groups of LGBT activists (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) in the United States, who have labeled it "junk technology."

The study is run by Michal Kosinski, a famous professor at Stanford University, who through his research has managed to "teach" an algorithm of artificial intelligence to recognize through the facial features of a photograph if the person is gay or heterosexual, with a striking precision of 91 percent for men and 83 percent for women.

The co-author of the study said he was perplexed by the innumerable criticisms of the gay community, arguing that technology is capable of teaching machines, and that it represents a driving force behind the study to present potentially dangerous applications of "AI" and press to safeguard and regulate privacy.

"One of my obligations as a scientist is that if I know something that can potentially protect people from falling prey to such risks, I should post it. Reject the results because you disagree with them ideologically ... you could be hurting the same people you care about. " Kosinski said

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The research was initially published by *** The Economist ***, used public images of an online dating portal, using only white people as a reference, to demonstrate that the algorithm was able to distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual persons correctly. #

The researchers "trained" the AI through a database that consisted of 35,326 faces of 14,776 people, implementing a program called VGG-Face, with the ability to convert the "Face Facial" of people into numbers, and through a system of "deep neural networks" allowed to find correlations between the facial features and the sexuality of the individuals, through the mathematical analysis of a great amount of biometric data.

As a result of this research it was possible to determine that homosexual men and women tend to have characteristics of atypical genera, for example, different expressions and aesthetic features. This means that gay men have more feminine traits and vice versa. The study also highlighted certain trends; reflecting that homosexual men have the narrower jaw, longer noses, and larger forehead than heterosexual men. As for the women, they have more prominent jaws and the forehead smaller than the heterosexual females.

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The study contrasted with a group of human judges who sought visually the distinguishing characteristics of the two sexual tendencies, obtaining poorer results than the intelligent algorithm. Obtaining a positive identification only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. This suggests that the face of people possesses much more information about sexual orientation than is able to perceive and interpret the human brain.

The paper also theorizes that the sexual orientation of an individual comes from exposure to certain hormones before birth, which would significantly influence the development of specific traits and with a specific sexual orientation.

The controversy

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The authors of the study say that their immediate intention is not to predict a person's sexuality, but rather to demonstrate that there is technology that can do it, and that it is possible to take the appropriate predictions about the dangers it entails. Scientists argue that they have not created a new technology, rather, they have compiled data and adapted existing software.

These statements have created great controversy about the origin of sexual orientation and the ethical consequences that technology would bring to the public. So Ashland Johnson, director of education and public research "Human Rights Campaign (HRC), has stated in a statement:

"Imagine for a moment the potential consequences if this flawed research will be used to support a brutal regime's efforts to identify and / or persecute people who believe they are gay"

"Stanford should steer clear of that junk science instead of giving its name and credibility to research that is dangerously flawed and leaves the world - and this case, millions of people's lives - worse and less secure than before".

Likewise., activist groups for the rights of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders have emphatically declared their rejection of this type of technology because they think that studies, besides excluding people of color and transsexuals or bisexuals, marginalizing the research to only a small group chosen by the researchers.

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And while the co-authors of the study recognized the limitations and argued that they did not find an acceptable number of homosexual people of color, and that the dating portal profiles were mostly white people.

Several experts on the subject have stated that it is necessary to interpret the findings on the ground and to raise the discussions and debate necessary to delimit the ethical and moral scope on the subject.

In my opinion, I think that this type of technological advances will bring more problems than solutions, and as we have seen in the article, the basis of study was made from a discrimination of certain races and genres that were excluded, this does not promise anything good, and even more, if it falls into unscrupulous hands, this exponentially increases the segregation of races and sexual tendencies, only by their appearance. A delicate subject that should be the subject of further analysis and considerations.

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